The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention. Throwing a big party is supposed to be fun, but crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather have stayed away. Chief among them is a crew of professional stick-up men who've spotted several lucrative opportunities, ranging from political moneymen with briefcases full of cash to that armored-car warehouse with the weakness in its security system.

Storm Prey: A Lucas Davenport Novel

Very early, 4:45, on a bitterly cold Minnesota morning, three big men burst through the door of a hospital pharmacy, duct-tape the hands, feet, mouth, and eyes of two pharmacy workers, and clean the place out. But then things swiftly go bad, one of the workers dies, and the robbers hustle out to their truck-and find themselves for just one second face-to-face with a blond woman in the garage: Weather Karkinnen, surgeon, wife of an investigator named Lucas Davenport.

Buried Prey

A house demolition provides an unpleasant surprise for Minneapolis - the bodies of two girls, wrapped in plastic. It looks like they've been there a long time. Lucas Davenport knows exactly how long.In 1985, Davenport was a young cop with a reputation for recklessness, and the girls' disappearance was a big deal. His bosses ultimately declared the case closed, but he never agreed with that. Now that he has a chance to investigate it all over again, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: It wasn't just the bodies that were buried. It was the truth.

Invisible Prey

In the richest neighborhood of Minneapolis, two elderly women lie murdered in their home, killed with a pipe, the rooms tossed, only small items stolen. It is clearly the random work of someone looking for money to buy drugs. But as Davenport looks more closely, he begins to wonder whether the items are actually so small and the victims so random; if there might not be some invisible agenda at work here. Gradually, a pattern begins to emerge, and it leads him to...certainly nothing he ever expected.

Broken Prey

The "Big Three" are a trio of inmates locked up in the Minnesota Security Hospital over the years, each a particularly vicious serial killer, each with his own distinct style and propensities. Everybody feels much safer knowing that they're behind bars. Except...there's a new killer on the loose. And his handiwork bears a disturbing resemblance to some of the finer points practiced by the Big Three, details that never even made the papers.

Stolen Prey

.Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed - husband, wife, two daughters, dogs. There’s something about the scene that pokes at Lucas’s cop instincts - it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he’s seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn’t seem to fit.

Hidden Prey

Six months ago, Lucas Davenport tackled his first case as a statewide troubleshooter, and he thought that one was plenty strange enough. But that was before the Russian got killed. On the shore of Lake Superior, a man named Vladimir Oleshev is found shot dead, three holes in his head and heart, and though nobody knows why he was killed, everybody - the local cops, the FBI, and the Russians themselves - has a theory. And when it turns out he had very high government connections, that's when it hits the fan.

Silken Prey: Lucas Davenport, Book 23

Very early one morning, a Minnesota political fixer answers his doorbell. The next thing he knows, he’s waking up on the floor of a moving car, lying on a plastic sheet, his body wet with blood. When the car stops, a voice says, "Hey, I think he’s breathing." And another voice says, "Yeah? Give me the bat." And that’s the last thing he knows. Davenport is investigating another case when the trail leads to the man’s disappearance, then - very troublingly - to the Minneapolis police department, then - most troublingly of all - to a woman who could give Machiavelli lessons.

Naked Prey: Lucas Davenport, Book 14

In Naked Prey, John Sandford puts Lucas Davenport through some changes. His old boss, Rose Marie Roux, has moved up to the state level and taken Lucas with her. In addition, Lucas is now married and a new father, both of which are fine with him: He doesn't mind being a family man. But he is a little worried. For every bit of peace you get, you have to pay - and he's waiting for the bill. It comes in the form of two people found hanging from a tree in the woods of northern Minnesota. What makes it particularly sensitive is that the bodies are of a black man and a white woman, and they're naked....

Mortal Prey

Years ago, Lucas Davenport almost died at the hands of Clara Rinker, a pleasant, soft-spoken, low-key Southerner, and the best hitwoman in the business. Now retired and living in Mexico, she nearly dies herself when a sniper kills her boyfriend, the son of a local druglord, and while the boy's father vows vengeance, Rinker knows something he doesn't: The boy wasn't the target, she was, and now she is going to have to disappear to find the killer herself.

Chosen Prey

An art history professor and writer and cheerful pervert, James Qatar had a hobby: he took secret photographs of women and turned them into highly sexual drawings. One day, he took the hobby a step further and...well, one thing led to another, and he had to kill her. A man in his position couldn't be too careful, after all. And you know something? He liked it.

Easy Prey: Lucas Davenport, Book 11

In life she was a high-profile model. In death she is the focus of a media firestorm that's demanding action from Lucas Davenport. One of his own men is a suspect in her murder. But when a series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated slayings rock the city, Davenport suspects a connection that runs deeper than anyone had imagined - one that leads to an ingenious killer more ruthless than anyone had feared....

Field of Prey: Lucas Davenport, Book 24

The night after the fourth of July, Layton Carlson, Jr., of Red Wing, Minnesota, finally got lucky. And unlucky.

He’d picked the perfect spot to lose his virginity to his girlfriend, an abandoned farmyard in the middle of cornfields: nice, private, and quiet. The only problem was...something smelled bad - like, really bad. He mentioned it to a county deputy he knew, and when the cop took a look, he found a body stuffed down a cistern. And then another, and another. By the time Lucas Davenport was called in, the police were up to 15 bodies and counting.

Certain Prey

Her name is Clara Rinker, a southern woman, trim, pleasant, attractive, and the best hit woman in the business. She isn't showy; she just goes quietly about her business, collects her money, and goes home. It's when she's hired for a job in Minnesota that things become complicated for her. A defense attorney wants a rival eliminated, and that's fine. But then a witness survives, the attorney starts acting weird, this big cop Davenport gets on her case, and loose ends begin popping up faster than on an unraveling sweater

Secret Prey: Lucas Davenport, Book 9

The company chairman lay on the cold ground of the woods, his eyes unseeing, his orange hunting jacket punctured by a rifle bullet at close range. Around him stood the four executives with whom he had been hunting, each with his or her own complicated agenda, each with a reason not to be sorrowful about the man's death. If he read it in a book, Lucas Davenport thought, it would seem like one of those classic murder mysteries, the kind where the detective gathers everyone together at the end and solves the case with a little speech.

Sudden Prey: A Lucas Davenport Novel

John Sandford's acclaimed Prey novels featuring the brilliant Lucas Davenport have plunged millions of readers into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind.... When Lucas and his team gun down two bank robbers in the middle of a heist, Davenport falls prey to the purest and simplest criminal motivation: revenge.

Gathering Prey: Prey, Book 25

They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, panhandling, committing no crimes - they just like to stay on the move. And now somebody is killing them. Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she'd befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody's killing her friends, she's afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing.

Heat Lightning

Flowers is only in his late 30's, but he's been around the block a few times, and he doesn't think much can surprise him anymore. He's wrong. It's a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, and Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives (the second one , if you're keeping count ) when the phone rings. It's Lucas Davenport. There's a body in Stillwater, two shots to the head, found near a veterans' memorial. And the victim has a lemon in his mouth.

Rough Country: A Virgil Flowers Novel

Virgil's always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he's probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case. While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort.

Mind Prey: A Lucas Davenport Novel

John Sandford's acclaimed Prey novels featuring the brilliant Lucas Davenport have plunged millions of readers into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind. Now Lucas has met his match. His newest nemesis is more intelligent, more deadly, than any he has tracked before: a kidnapper, a violator, and a cruel, wanton killer who knows more about mind games than Lucas himself.

Bad Blood: A Virgil Flowers Novel

One late fall Sunday in southern Minnesota, a farmer brings a load of soybeans to a local grain elevator - and a young man hits him on the head with a steel bar, drops him into the grain bin, waits until he's sure he's dead, and then calls the sheriff to report the "accident." Suspicious, the sheriff calls in Virgil Flowers, who quickly breaks the kid down...and the next day the boy's found hanging in his cell. Remorse? Virgil isn't so sure....

Night Prey: A Lucas Davenport Novel

John Sandford's best-selling Lucas Davenport series continues with the fast-paced, compelling thriller, Night Prey. A series of deaths leads to the possibility of a brutal serial killer of unusual skill and savagery. And if Lucas is right, the killer is just getting warmed up....

Shock Wave

The thrilling new Virgil Flowers novel from the #1 New York Times best-selling author. The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don't seem to be slowing the project, though, until someone decides to take matters into his own hands.

Dark of the Moon

Virgil Flowers kicked around for a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He's been doing the hard stuff for three years now, but never anything like this.

Publisher's Summary

Danger stalks Lucas Davenport at work and all too close to home, in the superlative new thriller by the number-one New York Times best-selling author. For 20 years, John Sandford's novels have been beloved for their "ingenious plots, vivid characters, crisp dialogue and endless surprises" (The Washington Post), and nowhere are those more in evidence than in the sudden twists and shocks of Wicked Prey.

The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention. Throwing a big party is supposed to be fun, but crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather have stayed away. Chief among them is a crew of professional stick-up men who've spotted several lucrative opportunities, ranging from political moneymen with briefcases full of cash to that armored-car warehouse with the weakness in its security system.

All that is headache enough for Lucas Davenport - but what's about to hit him is even worse. A while back, a stray bullet put a pimp and petty thief named Randy Whitcomb in a wheelchair, and ever since, the man has been nursing his grudge into a full head of psychotic steam. He blames Davenport for the bullet, but it's no fun just shooting him. That wouldn't be painful enough. Not when Davenport has a pretty 14-year-old adopted daughter that Whitcomb can target instead.

And then there's the young man with the .50 caliber sniper rifle and the right-wing-crazy background, roaming through a city filled with the most powerful politicians on earth....

I have listened to many of the Davenport novels from Audible as well as Sandford's companion Flowers series. From reading prior reviews I expected to be a satisfied Sandford returning customer and I was not disappointed. This story moves along quickly and is not difficult to stay with as long as you don't try to remember all the details of each character (of which there are many, as other reviewers have pointed out). There are two weaknesses that I saw here, which I agree on with other negative reviewers. There is a lot of profanity and violence; for sure this is characteristic of the Davenport/Flowers novels and if you don't like that then you won't like this book. Second, and more importantly, the plot is a little thin ... this book is tied in very closely with the last Davenport and Flowers novels in the series and it almost feels like Sandford was trying to crank out as much as possible in as short a time as he could. I would have liked to seen a little more intricacy in the plot line. That said, though, I liked the book and would recommend it and purchase it again.
No review of this book or the other Prey novels would be complete without mention of Richard Ferrone's narration. Ferrone's voice is perfect for these stories. He can portray the bad guys really eerily and gets the tough good guys nailed. His voice sounds like he's been gargling with gunpowder and it's perfect for these books. With this novel I found that I was looking forward to more Richard Ferrone as much as I was to more John Sandford and Lucas Davenport.
Overall a great combination. In spite of some weaknesses, five stars.

Two distinct subplots with little connection between them. One was excellent, the other was OK. Probably neither was enough for a complete novel, so ...
But, I always enjoy Sandford's books, especially the Prey series. I 'prey' that he'll write more of them.

I had to restart the 1st hr. Trying to keep track of the charaters and the plotline is challenging when EVERY charater sounds exactly the same. Very frustrating, I eventually quit trying. I did purchase at the discounted rate and I still wish I could get my $$$ back. Don't bother.

I would have preferred one major story line in this novel and I think the presence of two detracted from the listen. Sandford linked them in an implausible way and that made it even worse. The other weakness in the book was the way Davenport's 14-year-old daughter was portrayed. At every turn she seemed to have a television field crew at her beck and call. And all this during the Republican National Convention. C'mon! Negatives aside, Sandford did his usual good job of creating evil characters who possessed a few redeeming social values such as sadness expressed for fallen comrades. The book's ending might leave something to be desired for listeners who prefer to see a total victory for justice and the complete tying up of loose ends. Ferrone is excellent as a reader and adds to the overall product. A good listen for Davenport fans.

I expected better from this book. Overall, I found it hard to get through. Too much detail in the wrong places that lead nowhere. You had to listen to all kinds of, frankly, boring detail to get to the action. The opportunities where the plot could get interesting or lead down a path which would make it good were missed. The ending was not exciting but more of a relief. I think that this author has potential, but this was clearly not one of his better efforts.

Last week, I listened to "Stolen Prey" and really enjoyed it. I was looking forward to this new one, "Wicked Prey." I really liked the reader. The plot was OK, too. But, my objection to the book is having to listen to so much trash/profane language of the bad guys. I'm no prude, but listening to street gang jargon, bad language and swearing is not my cup of tea. If I were reading the book, I would just skim over those parts to get the gist of it, and move on. But, listening to pages and pages of punk talk turned me off. I finished it, and look forward to Lucas Davenport's next adventure, but I hope that his criminals get out of the gutter.

Classic Lucas Davenport, A#1 in my book, and nobody reads the Prey Series like Richard Ferrone. In this installment, we hear from characters in previous books of the series AND! Letty is growing up fast and included in this story. All in all a great listen.

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